Complex strands of DNA backlog

Nearly a decade ago, the Justice Department launched a $600 million effort to eliminate the backlog of untested DNA evidence sitting in crime labs and police departments nationwide.

But at the same time, the Justice Department, along with Congress and state legislatures, began a push to have law enforcement collect more DNA, including from people arrested for nonviolent crimes.

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The result: The DNA backlog is growing, not shrinking, and crime lab directors say they’re so overwhelmed with samples that it’s hard for them to find the murderers, rapists and other criminals whose DNA may be waiting on their shelves.

Yet as crime lab directors, civil libertarians and even some law enforcement officials advocate for narrower collection policies, they have encountered a powerful obstacle: a lobbying firm with close ties to both the Justice Department and to private companies that profit directly from increased DNA testing.

The firm, Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs, lobbies the Justice Department and lawmakers on behalf of the world’s leading producer of DNA testing equipment.

Despite that relationship, the Justice Department awarded Gordon Thomas Honeywell a no-bid grant in 2002 to do a key study on backlogs that has helped shape the government’s DNA policies — policies that have benefited the firm’s private clients.

The firm subsequently worked on four additional DNA-related projects for the federal government, all commissioned by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department. Most were done without an open bidding process that would have allowed universities with forensic science departments to compete for the work.

None of Gordon Thomas Honeywell’s employees are forensic scientists, but the firm’s credentials are well-known to the NIJ. A Gordon Thomas Honeywell vice president, Christopher Asplen, spent four years at the Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney specializing in DNA. And on three of its government assignments, the firm has partnered with a Florida nonprofit led by a former NIJ employee.

Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Oliver said the government hired Gordon Thomas Honeywell “to take advantage of their expertise in DNA policy” — and not because of the firm’s ties to NIJ.

But Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) is skeptical. At his direction, the Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether NIJ awards its grants fairly and openly.

“At the very least, there are questionable conflicts of interest, serious voids of transparency and unethical behavior unbecoming to the Department of Justice,” Shelby said in a statement to ProPublica.

In 2006, Shelby asked the National Academy of Sciences to study backlogs and other problems facing the nation’s crime labs. That report, released in February, urged Congress to create a new federal agency to police labs, saying NIJ wasn’t up to the job.

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In 1994, a stranger broke into Greene’s Orlando, Fla., home and beat and raped her. Greene lived in fear while waiting for police to find the man. But the DNA he left on her leggings went untested for more than three years.

When the test results finally came back, she learned that her attacker had committed an earlier rape. His DNA from that case was backlogged for two years — the window of time in which he attacked Greene.